POETRY AND DRAMA

Other books by T. S. Eliot

if

COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1935

FOUR QUARTETS
THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS
SWEENEY AGONISTES
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
THE FAMILY REUNION
THE COCKTAIL PARTY
SELECTED ESSAYS
THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE OF CRITICISM
THOUGHTS AFTER LAMBETH
THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
WHAT IS A CLASSIC?
NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE
POINTS OF VIEW
*

OLD POSSUM'S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS

POETRY
AND
DRAMA
by

T. S. ELIOT

The Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
November 21, 1950

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 I

is a customary act of respect that the lecturer on a

founda-
tion should begin
by saying something about the nwn in
It whose name the lectureshipwas founded. The fact that
between Theodore Spencer and myself there had been a long

friendship terminated only by death, was (I believe) the primary

reason for my being asked to inaugurate this series: as it was
Certainly my primary reason for accepting the honour.

Except when there has been some accident to fix it in my

memory, Ifind that I seldom remember the occasion of my first
meeting with anyone who has subsequently become an associate
or friend. I am not now sure whether I first met Theodore

Spencer while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College,

Cambridge, or on some later visit that he paid to Englandfor
he loved Cambridge and liked to return there. I had certainly
met him in England, and probably several times, before I came
to Harvard as Norton
Professor in 1932.- But it was during that
year, when I saw him almost every day) at
Eliot House, or in
his own home, or in the company of mutual friends, that we
were closely associated; and it was through this constant

7
frequentation that I came to love
and appreciate the man. He

put his time most generously at my disposal; helped me at every

juncture with a course of lectures to a small class which he him-
self had been instrumental in selecting; and there was no detail

of daily life
which he was not ready to give aid, and no
in

material need which he was not anxious to anticipate. And the

day on which he did not drop in

for a chat before lunch, was
always a duller day than the others.
After 1933 1 saw him) of course, only at intervals. He visited
England several times I remember that he was present, in

Cambridge, at the Encaenia at which I received a doctor's

degree,
and I remember his pleasure in the event. Between
visits, we carried on a desultory correspondence. In 1938, or per-

haps early in 1939, the rumour reached us in England that

economies were being effected, which might be adverse to his

promotion or security of tenure at Harvard, and I was a party

to the manoeuvres
of some of his friends in Cambridge, Eng-
land, toward obtaining for him a Lectureship there. In 1939 he
was appointed a Lectureship at Cambridge University, but
to

the outbreak of war, the immediate reduction in the

owing to
numbers of students in the
English Tripos, and the consequent
reduction in the number of tutors, it was deemed best that his

appointment should be deferred. This was a great disappoint-

ment to his friends in England; but on the other hand, we had
the pleasure of hearing of his
reappointment to Harvard as
}

'visiting
lecturer
from Cambridge University. It was not long

before
he received promotion.
I should like to add a note which I hope is not indiscreet.
When the
august position ofBoylston Professor
became vacant,
Ted Spencer was not one to covet that postfor himself. He wrote
to me to ask whether I would consider the
privately, position
8
if my name were putforward. Well, there were several reasons,
both private and public, why I could not regard
myself as
eligible
: not the least
of which was my lack of scholarship /
think I told him that I should have had to spend all
my spare
time reading the books I ought to have read, and would have no
leisure
left for writing. My delight and satisfaction were great
when I read that he himself had received that distinguished

appointment.
Though I do not remember ourfirst meeting, I remember very
It was in
clearly our last. Cambridge, Massachusetts, just
before my return to London, and only a few weeks before his

death. He was full of enthusiasm for the work he was to under-

take that year; he appeared in better health, and more radiantly

happy, than I had ever seen him; and I thought that he had
many years of both scholarly and creative work and of useful
influence before him.
I do not need to remind those who knew him, or indeed those
who were even slightly acquainted
with him, of the charm of
his
personality, his
interest in human beings,
his
gaiety, sense of
humour and conviviality with a bearing such that he could

put his pupils on terms of informal equality, without ever

losing his dignity
or their respect. He had several traits, in

happy combination, which made him a good teacher. His stan-

dards of scholarship were high, and his view of English studies

was humane; he mixed with men of letters in New York and

London, as well as in the universities; and was perfectly at ease

in
society,
whether intellectual
society
or not, so that he knew
his students as human beings,
not merely as candidates for

degrees.
He had a sensitive appreciation of the best in contem-

porary literature; and his own poetic gift was genuine. His

poetry had developed,

and would I believe have gone on to still

P.D. 2
greater strength after
he had further assimilated and re-created

the
powerful influence of Yeats. But I have left to the last, men-
tion
of those characteristics which most endeared him as a
friend: humility, charity, generosity, and what I can only call
a fundamental goodness.
In choosing a subject, I have had in mind that it should be a

subject in some way related

to Theodore
Spencer's interests,
and that itshould be a subject on which he himself would have
liked to hear me.

10
 2

I j eviewing my critical
output for the last
thirty-

-^^ odd years, I am surprised to find how constantly

-JL. ^^J have returned to the drama, whether by ex-
amining the work of the contemporaries of Shakespeare,
or by reflecting on the possibilities of the future. It may
even be that people are weary of hearing me on this
subject. But, while I find that I have been composing
variations on this theme all my life, my views have
been continually modified and renewed by increasing
experience so that I am impelled to take stock of the
;

situation afresh at every stage of my own experimentation.

As I have gradually learned more about the problems
of poetic drama, and the conditions which it must fulfil
if it is to justify itself, I have made a little clearer to myself,

not only my own reasons for wanting to write in this

form, but the more general reasons for wanting to see it
restored to its place. And I think that if I say something
about these problems and conditions, it should make
clearer to other people whether and if so why poetic
11
drama has anything potentially to offer the playgoer, that
prose drama cannot. For I start with the assumption that
if poetry merely a decoration, an added embellishment,
is

if it merely gives people of literary tastes the pleasure of

listening to poetry at the same time that they are witness-

ing a play, then it is

superfluous. It must justify itself
dramatically, and not merely be fine poetry
shaped into
a dramatic form,,. From this it follows that no play should
be written in verse for which prose
^ is
dramatically

adequate.
And from this it follows, again, that the
audience, its attention held by the dramatic action, its

emotions stirred by the situation between the characters,

should be too intent upon the play to be wholly conscious
of the medium.
Whether we use prose or verse on the stage, they are
both but means to an end. The difference, from one point
of view, is not so great as we might think. In those prose

plays which survive, which are read and produced on the

stage by later generations, the prose in which the charac-

ters speak is as remote, for the best
part, from the vocab-

ulary, syntax and rhythm of our ordinary speech

with fumbling for words, its constant recourse to
its

approximation, its disorder and its unfinished sentences

as verse is. Like verse, it has been written, and re-
written. Our two greatest prose stylists
in the drama

apartfrom Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans who

mixed prose and verse in the same play are, I believe,

Congreve and Bernard Shaw. A speech by a character of

Congreve or of Shaw has however clearly the charac-
ters
may be differentiated that unmistakable personal

rhythm' which is the mark of a prose style, and of which

12
only the most accomplished conversationalists who
are for that matter usually
monolo.guists show any
trace in their talk. We have all heard (too often!) of
Moliere's character who expressed surprise when told
that he spoke prose. But it was M. Jourdain who was
right, and not his mentor or his creator he did not speak :

prose he only talked. For I mean to draw a triple dis-

tinction: between prose, and verse, and our ordinary

speech which is mostly below die level of either verse or

prose. So if you look at it in this way, it will appear that

gro^,onthe stage L isjis artificial as verse or alternatively, :

that yerse_can3jJLL^
But while the sensitive member of the audience will

appreciate, when he hears fine prose spoken in a play, that

this something better than ordinary conversation, he
is

does not regard it as a wholly different language from

that which he himself speaks, for that would interpose a
barrier between himself and the imaginary characters on
the stage. Too many people, on the other hand, approach
a play which they know to be in verse, with the con-
sciousness of the difference. It is unfortunate when they
are repelled by verse, but can also be deplorable when

they are attracted by it if that means that they are pre-

pared to enjoy the play and the language of the play as

two separate things. Thejchief effect of style and rhythm

in dramatic speech, whether in prose or verse, should be
*-_, ..
* -.'-.-'--'
unconscious.
From follows that a mixture of prose and verse
this it

in the same play is generally to be avoided: each transition

makes the auditor aware, with a jolt, of the medium. It

is, we may say, justifiable when the

author wishes to
13
produce when, that is, he wishes to transport the
this jolt :

audience violently from one plane of reality to another.

I
suspect that this kind of transition was easily acceptable
to an Elizabethan audience, to whose ears
bodhjgrosejind
verse came naturally; who lite3TiigEfaIutin and low
^"**** **- - * *"^
1
u. -

Jn*^, J^^ tojk , i, H

comedy in the same play and to whom it seemed per- ;

haps proper that the more humble and rustic characters

should speak in a homely language, and that those of
more exalted rank should rant in verse. But even in the
plays of Shakespeare some of the prose passages seem to
be designed for an effect of contrast which, when
achieved, is something that can never become old-
fashioned. The knocking at the gate in Macbeth is an
example that comes to everyone's mind but it has long ;

seemed to me that the alternation of scenes in prose with

scenes in verse in Henry IV points an ironic contrast be-
tween the world of high politics
and the world of com-
mon life. The audience probably thought they were
getting their accustomed chronicle play garnished with
amusing scenes of low life yet the prose scenes of both ;

Part I and Part II provide a sardonic comment upon the

bustling ambitions of the chiefs of the parties in the in-

surrection of the Percys.

Today, however, because of the handicap under which

verse drama suffers, I believe that prose should be used

very sparingly indeed that we should aim at a form of ;

verse in which everything can be said that has to be said ;

and that when we find some situation which is intractable

in verse, it is merely that our form of verse is inelastic.
And if there
prove to be scenes which we cannot put in
verse, we must either develop our verse, or avoid having
14
to introduce such scenes. For we have. to accustom our,
audiences to verse to the^oiat at which
to be conscious of it and to introduce prose dialogue,
;

would only be to distract their attention from the play

itself to the medium of its
expression. But if our verse is
to have so wide a range that it can say
anything that has to
be said, it follows that it will not be 'poetry' all the time.
Itwill only be 'poetry' when the dramatic situation has
reached such a point of intensity that poetry becomes the
natural utterance, because then it is the only language in
which the emotions can be expressed at all.

It is indeed necessary for any long poem, if it is to

escape to be able to say homely things with-

monotony,
out bathos, as well as to take the highest flights without
sounding exaggerated. And it is still more important in a
play, especially if it is concerned with contemporary life.
The reason for writing even the more pedestrian parts of
i verse play in verse instead of prose is, however, not only
:o avoid calling the audience's attention to the fact that it

s at other moments listening to poetry. It is also that the

verse rhythm should have its effect upon the hearers,

without their being conscious of it. A brief analysis of one
scene of Shakespeare's may illustrate this point. The open-
as well constructed an opening
ing scene of Hamlet
scene as that of any play ever written has the advantage
of being one that everybody knows.
What we do not notice, when we witness this scene in
the theatre, is the great variation of style. Nothing is

superfluous, and there is no line of poetry which is not

justified by its dramatic value. The first
twenty-two lines

15
 of the simplest words in the most homely idiom.
are built

Shakespeare had worked for a long time in the theatre,

and written a good many plays, before reaching the
point at which he could write those twenty-two lines.
There is
nothing quite so simplified and sure in his pre-

vious work. He first developed conversational, colloquial

verse in the monologue of the
character part Faulcon-

bridge in King John, and later the Nurse in Romeo and

It was a much further
Juliet. step to carry it unobtrusively
into the dialogue of brief replies. No
poet has begun to
master dramatic verse until he can write lines which, like
these in Hamlet, are
transparent.
You are consciously at-
tending, not to the poetry, but to the meaning of the
poetry. If you were hearing Hamlet for the first time,
without knowing anything about the play, I do not think
that it would occur to you to ask whether the speakers
were speaking in verse or prose. The verse is having a
different effect upon us from prose but at the moment,
;

what we are aware of is the frosty night, the officers keep-

ing watch on the battlements, and the foreboding of an-
ominous action. I do not say that there is no place for the
situation in which part of one's pleasure will be the enjoy-
ment of hearing beautiful poetry providing that the
author gives in that place, dramatic inevitability. And
it,

of course, when we have both seen a play several times

and read between performances, we begin to analyse
it

the means by which the author has produced his effects.

But in the immediate impact of this scene we are uncon-
scious of the medium of its expression.
From the short, brusque ejaculations at the beginning,
suitable to the situation and to the character of the guards
16
 but not expressing more character than
required for is

their function in the the verse

play glides into a slower
movement with the appearance of the courtiers Horatio
and Marcellus.

Horatio says 't is but our fantasy, . . .

and the movement changes again on the appearance of

Royalty, the ghost of the King, into the solemn and
sonorous

What art thou, that

usurp' st this time of night, . . .

(and note, by the way, this anticipation of the plot con-

veyed by the use of the verb usurp) and majesty is sug- ;

gested in a reference reminding us whose ghost this is :

So frown' d he an angry park,

once, when, in

He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

There an abrupt change to staccato in Horatio's words

is

to the Ghost on its second appearance; this rhythm

changes again with the words

We do it
wrong, being so majestical,
To offer
it the show of violence;
For it is, as the air, invulnerable,

And our vain blows malicious mockery.

The scene reaches a resolution with the words of

Marcellus :

It
faded on the crowing of the cock.

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all

night long; . . .

P.D.-3 I?
and Horatio's answer :

So have I heard and do part believe it.

in

But} look, the morn, in russet mantle clad}

}
Walks o er the dew of yon high eastern hill.

Break we our watch up; . . .

This is
great poetry, and it is dramatic; but besides
being poetic and dramatic, it is
something more. There
emerges, when we analyse it, a kind of musical design
also which move-
reinforces and is one with the dramatic
ment. It has checked and accelerated the pulse of our emo-
tion without our knowing it. Note that in these last words
of Marcellus there a deliberate brief emergence of the
is

poetic into consciousness. When we hear the lines

But) look) the morH) in russet mantle clad)

}
Walks o er the dew of yon high eastern hill

we are lifted for a moment beyond character, but with no

sense of unfitness of the words coming, and at this mo-

ment, from the lips of Horatio. The transitions in the

scene obey laws of the music of dramatic poetry. Note
that the two lines of Horatio which I have quoted twice
are preceded by 'a line of the simplest speech which might
be either verse or prose :

So have I heard and do in

part believe it

and that he follows them abruptly with a half line which

is
hardly more than a stage direction :

Break we our watch up.

It would be interesting to pursue, by a similar analysis,

this problem of the double pattern in great poetic drama
18
 which may be examined from the point of
the pattern
view of stagecraft or from that of the music. But I think
that the examination of this one scene is enough to show
us that verse not merely a formalization, or an added
is

decoration, but that it intensifies the drama. It should in-

dicate also the importance of the unconscious effect of the
verse upon us. And lastly,
I do not think that this effect
'

is
only by those members of an audience who like
felt

poetry' but also by those who go for the play alone. By

the people who do not like poetry, I mean those who can-
not sit down with a book of poetry and enjoy reading it :

these people also, when they go to a play in verse, should

be affected by the poetry. And these are the audiences
whom the writer of such a play ought to keep in mind.
At this point I might say a word about those
plays
which we call poetiCj though they are written in prose.
The plays ofJohn Millington Synge form rather a special
case, because they are~baseJ upon the idiom^of a rural

people whose speech naturally poetic, both in imagery

is

and in rhythm. I believe that he even incorporated phrases

which he had heard from these country people of Ireland.
The language of Synge is not available
except for plays
set among that same
people. We can draw more general
conclusions from the plays in prose, so much admired in

my youth, and now

hardly even read, by Maeterlinck.
These plays are in a different way restricted in their sub-
ject matter; and to say that the characterization in them
is dim is an understatement. I do not deny that they have
some poetic quality. But in order to be poetic in prose, a
dramatist has to be so consistently poetic that his scope
is
very limited. Synge wrote plays about characters whose
19
 so he could make them
originals in life talked poetically,
talk poetry and remain real people. The poetic prose

dramatist who has not this advantage, has to be too

poetic. The poetic drama in prose is more limited by

poetic convention or by our conventions as to what sub-
ject matter is
poetic, than is the poetic drama in verse. A

really dramatic verse can be employed, as Shakespeare

employed it, most matter-of-fact things.
to say the
Yeats is a very different case, from Maeterlinck or

Synge. A study of his development as a dramatist would

show, I think, the great distance he went, and the triumph
of his last plays. In his first period, he wrote plays in verse
about subjects conventionally accepted as suitable for
verse, in a metric which though even at that early stage
having the personal Yeats rhythm is not really a form
of speech quite suitable for anybody except mythical
kings and queens. His middle-period Plays for Dancers are
very beautiful, but they do not solve any problem for the
dramatist in verse they are poetic prose plays with im-
:

portant interludes in verse. It was only in his last play

Purgatory that he solved his problem of speech in verse,
and laid all his successors under obligation to him.

20
 3

I am going to venture to make some ob-

servations based on my own
Now, which will lead
experience,
me to comment on my inten-
tions, failures and partial successes, in my own plays. I do
this in the belief that
any explorer or experimenter in
new territory may, by putting on record a kind of jour-
nal of his explorations, say something of use to those who
follow him into the same regions and who will perhaps

go farther.
The thing of any importance that I discovered,
first

was that a writer who has worked for years, and achieved
some success, in writing other kinds of verse, has to ap-
proach the writing of a verse play in a different frame of
mind from that to which he has been accustomed in
his previous work. In writing other verse, I think that
one is
writing, so to speak, in terms of one's own voice :

the way it sounds when you read it to yourself is the test.

For yourself speaking. The question of

it is communi-
cation, of what the reader will get from it, is not
21
paramount if your poem is right to you, you can only
:

hope that the readers will eventually come to accept it.

The poem can wait a little while the approval of a few
;

sympathetic and judicious critics is enough to begin with ;

and it is for future readers to meet the poet more than half
way. Itotjjn jtjhe theatre, theproblem of communication
presents jtself imm^ are deliberately writing
verse for other voices, not for your own, and you do not
know whose voices they will be. You are aiming to
write lines which will have an immediate effect upon an
unknown and unprepared audience, to be interpreted to
:hat audience by unknown actors rehearsed by an un-

known producer. And the unknown audience cannot be

expected to show any indulgence towards the poet. The
poet cannot afford to write his play merely for his ad-
mirers, those who know his nondramatic work and are

prepared to receive favourably anything he puts his

name to. He must write with an audience in view which
knows nothing and about any previous
cares nothing,
success he may have had before he ventured into the
theatre. Hence one finds out that many of the things one
likes to do, and knows how to do, are out of place; and
that every line must be judged by a new law, that of
dramatic relevance.
When I wrote Murder in the Cathedral I had the advan-
tage for a beginner, of an occasion which called for a sub-
ject generally admitted to be suitable for verse. Verse
plays, has been generally held, should either take their
it

subject matter from some mythology, or else should be

about some remote historical period, far enough away
from the present for the characters not to need to be
22
recognizable as human beings, and therefore for them to
be licensed to talk in verse. Picturesque period costume
renders verse much more acceptable. Furthermore, my

play was to be produced for a rather special kind of

audience an audience of those serious people who go
to 'festivals' and expect to have to put up with poetry

though perhaps on this some of them were not

occasion

quite prepared for what they got. And finally it was a

religious play, and people who go
deliberately to a reli-
gious play at a religious festival expect to be patiently
bored and to satisfy themselves with the feeling that they
have done something meritorious. So the path was made
easy.
It was only when I put my mind to thinking what sort
of play I wanted to do next, that I realized that in Murder
in the Cathedral I had not solved any general problem but ;

that from my point of view the play was a dead end. For
one thing, the problem of language which that play had
presented to me was a special problem. Fortunately, I did
not have to write in the idiom of the twelfth century,
because that idiom, even if I knew Norman French and
Anglo-Saxon, would have been unintelligible. But the
vocabulary and style could not be exactly those of
modern conversation some modern French plays
as in

using the plot and personages of Greek drama because

I had to take
my audience back to an historical event;
and they could not afford to be archaic, first because
archaism would only have suggested the wrong period,
and second because I wanted to bring home to the

audience the contemporary relevance of the situation.

The style therefore
had to be neutral, committed neither
23
to the present nor to the past. As for the versification, I
was only aware at this stage that the essential was to avoid
any echo of Shakespeare, for I was persuaded that the
primary failure of nineteenth-century poets when they
wrote for the theatre (and most of the greatest English
poets had tried their hand at drama) was not in their
theatrical technique, but in their dramatic language ; and
that this was due
largely to their limitation to a strict
blank verse which, after extensive use for nondramatic
poetry, had lost the flexibility which blank verse must
have if it is to give the effect of conversation. The rhythm
of regular blank verse had become too remote from the
movement of modern speech. Therefore what I
kept in
mind was the versification of Everyman, hoping that any-

thing unusual in the sound of it would be, on the whole,

advantageous. An avoidance of too much iambic, some

use of alliteration, and occasional unexpected rhyme,

helped to distinguish the versification from that of the

nineteenth century.
The versification of the dialogue in Murder in the

Cathedral has therefore, in my opinion, only a negative

merit : it succeeded in avoiding what had to be avoided,
but it arrived at no
positive novelty : in short, in so far as
it solved the problem of speech in verse for writing today,
it solved for this play only, and provided me with no
it

clue to the verse I should use in another kind of play.

Here, then, were two problems left unsolved that of the :

idiom and that of the metric (it

is
really one and the same
problem), for general use in any play I might want to
write in future. I next became aware of my reasons for

depending, in that play, so heavily upon the assistance of

24
the chorus. There were two reasons for this, which in the
circumstances justified it. The first was that the essential

action of the play both the historical facts and the mat-
ter which I invented was somewhat limited. A man
he will be kiUed,jmd hejs
killed... I did not want to increaseme number of charac-
ters, I did not want to write a chronicle of twelfth-century
politics,
nor did I want to tamper unscrupulously with
the meagre records as Tennyson did (in introducing Fair
Rosamund, and in suggesting that Becket had been
crossed in love in early youth). I wanted to concentrate
on death and martyrdom. The introduction of a chorus
of excited and sometimes hysterical women, reflecting in
their emotion the significance of the action, helped won-

derfully. The second reason was this that a poet writing

:

for the time for the stage, is

first much more at home in
choral verse than in dramatic dialogue. This, I felt sure,
was something I could do, and perhaps the dramatic
weaknesses would be somewhat covered up by the cries
of the women. The use of a chorus strengthened the
power, and concealed the defects of my theatrical
technique. For this reason I decided that next time I
would try to integrate the chorus more closely into the
play.
I wanted to find out also, whether I could learn to

dispense altogether with the use of prose. The two prose

passages in Murder in the Cathedral could not have been
written in verse. Certainly, with the kind of dialogue
verse which I used in that play, the audience would have
been uncomfortably aware that it was verse they were
hearing. A sermon cast in verse is too unusual an
P.D. 4 25
experience for even the most regular churchgoer nobody :

could have responded to it as a sermon at all. And in the

speeches of the knights, who are quite aware that they are
addressing an audience of people living 800 years after
they themselves are dead, the use of platform prose is in-
tended of course to have a special effect to shock the
:

audience out of their complacency. But this is a kind of

trick: that is, a device tolerable only in one play and of
no use for any other. I may, for aught I know, have been
slightly under the influence of St. Joan.

I do not wish to give the impression that I would

you
rule out of dramatic poetry these three things historical :

or mythological subject-matter, the chorus, and tradi-

tional blank verse. do not wish to lay down any law
I

that the only suitable characters and situations are those of

modern life, or that a verse play should consist of dialogue
only, or that a wholly new versification is
necessary. I

am only tracing out the route of exploration of one

writer, and that one, myself. If the poetic drama is to

reconquer its
place, it must, in my opinion, enter into
overt competition with prose drama. As I have said,

people are prepared to put up with verse from the lips of

personages dressed in the fashion of some distant age ;

they should be made to hear it frorr/people dressed like

ourselves, living in houses and apartments like ours, and

using telephones and motorcars and radio sets. Audiences

are prepared to accept poetry recited by a chorus, for that
is a kind of
poetry recital, which it does them credit to
enjoy. And audiences (those who go to a verse play be-
cause it is in verse) expect poetry to be in rhythms which
26
Jiave lost touch with colloquial speech. What we have
to do is to bring poetry into the world in which the
audience lives and to which it returns when it leaves the
theatre not to transport the audience into some imagi-
;

nary world totally unlike its own, an unreal world in

which poetry is tolerated. What I should hope might
be achieved, by a generation of dramatists having the
benefit of our experience, is that the audience should find,
at the moment of awareness that
hearing poetry, it is

that it is
saying could
to talk in poetry
itself: 'I
'

too ! Then we should not be transported into an arti-

ficial world on the contrary, our own sordid, dreary
;

daily world would be suddenly illuminated and trans-

figured.
was determined, therefore, in my next play to take a
I

theme of contemporary life, with characters of our own

time living in our own wo^ld. The Family Reunion was
the result. Here my first concern was the problem of the
versification, to find a rhythm close to contemporary
speech, in which the stresses could be made to come
wherever we should naturally put them, in uttering the

particular phrase on the particular occasion. What I

worked out is
substantially what I have continued to em-
ploy a line of varying length and
:
varying number of
syllables, with
a caesura and three stresses. The caesura
md the stresses may come at different places, almost any-
where in the line; the stresses may be close together or
well separated by light syllables the only rule being that
;

there must be one stress on one side of the caesura and two
on the other. In retrospect, I soon saw that I had given my
attention to versification, at the expense of plot and
27
character. I had, indeed, made some progress in dispensing
with the chorus but the device of using four of the
;

minor personages, representing the Family, sometimes

as individual character parts and sometimes collectively
as chorus, does not seem to me very satisfactory. For one

thing, the immediate transition from individual, charac-

terized part to membership of a chorus is asking too
much of the actors a very difficult transition to ac-
: it is

complish. For another thing, it seemed to me another

trick, one which, even if successful, could not have been

applicable in another play. Furthermore, I had in two

passages used the device of a lyrical duet further isolated
from the rest of the dialogue by being written in shorter
lines with only two These passages are in a sense
stresses.

'beyond character,' the speakers have to be presented as

falling into a kind of trance-like state in order to speak
them. But they are so remote from the necessity of the
action that they are hardly more than passages of poetry
which might be spoken by anybody they are too much
;

like operatic arias. The member of the audience, if he en-

joys this sort of thing, is putting up with a suspension of

the action in order to enjoy a poetic fantasia these pas- :

sages are really less related to the action than are the
choruses in Murder in the Cathedral.

I observed that when Shakespeare, in one of his mature

plays, introduces what might seem a purely poetic line
or passage, it never interrupts the action, or is out of
character, but on the contrary, in some mysterious way

supports both action and character. When Macbeth

speaks his so often quoted words beginning
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
28
or whenOthello, confronted at night with his angry
father-in-law and friends, utters the beautiful line

Keep up your bright swords, for

the dew will rust them

we do not Shakespeare has thought of lines

feel that

which are beautiful poetry and wishes to fit them in

somehow, or that he has for the moment come to the
end of his dramatic inspiration and has turned to poetry
to fill up with. The lines are surprising, and yet they fit in
with the character or ; else we are compelled to adjust our
conception of the character in such a way that the lines
will be appropriate to it. The lines spoken by Macbeth re-
veal the weariness of the weak man who had been forced

by his wife to realize his own half-hearted desires and her

ambitions, and who, with her death, is left without the

motive to continue. The lineof Othello expresses irony,
dignity and fearlessness ; and incidentally reminds us of
the time of night in which the scene takes place. Only\

poetry could do this but it is dramatic poetry that is,

;
: it

does not interrupt but intensifies the dramatic situation.

was not only because of the introduction of passages
It

which called too much attention to themselves as poetry,

and could not be dramatically justified, that I found The
Family Reunion defective: there were two weaknesses
which came to strike me as more serious still. The first
was, that I had taken far too much of the strictly limited
time allowed to a dramatist, in presenting a situation, and
not myself enough time, or provided myself with
left

enough material, for developing it in action. I had written

what was, on the whole, a good first act except that for ;

a first act it was much too long. When the curtain rises

29
again, the audience is expecting, as it has a right to expect,
that something is going to happen. Instead, it finds itself
treated to a further exploration of the background in :

other words, to what ought to have been given much

earlier if at all. The beginning of the second act presents
much the most difficult problem to producer and cast:
for the audience's attention beginning to wander. And
is

then, after what must seem to the audience an intermin-

able time of preparation, the conclusion comes so abrupt-

ly that we are, after all, unready for it. This was an

elementary fault in mechanics.

But the deepest flaw of all, was in a failure of adjust-
ment between the Greek story and the modern situation.
I should either have stuck closer to
Aeschylus or else
taken a great deal more liberty with his myth. One evi-
dence of the appearance of those ill-fated figures,
this is

the Furies. They must, in future, be omitted from the

cast,and be understood to be visible only to certain of my
characters, and not to the audience. We tried every pos-
sible manner of presenting them. We put them on the
stage, and they looked like uninvited guests who had
strayed in from a fancy dress ball. We concealed them
behind gauze, and they suggested a still out of a Walt

Disney film. We
made them dimmer, and they looked
like
shrubbery just outside the window. I have seen other
expedients tried I have seen them signalling from across
:

the garden, or swarming onto the

stage like a football
team, and they are never right. They never succeed in
being either Greek goddesses or modern spooks. But their
failure merely a symptom of the
is failure to adjust the

ancient with the modern.

30
 A more serious evidence is that we are left in a divided
frame of mind, not knowing whether to consider the play
the tragedy of the mother or the salvation of the son. The
two situations are not reconciled. I find a confirmation
of this in the fact that my sympathies now have come to
be all with the mother, who seems to me, except perhaps
for the chauffeur, the only complete human being in the
play and
;
my hero now strikes me as an insufferable prig.

Well, had made some progress in learning how to

I

write the first act of a play, and I had the one thing of
which I felt sure made a good deal of progress in find-
ing a form of versification and an idiom which would
serve purposes, without recourse to prose, and be
all
my
capable of unbroken transition between the most intense
speech and the most relaxed dialogue. You will under-
stand, after my making these criticisms of The Family
Reunion, some of the errors that I endeavoured to avoid
in designing The Cocktail Party. To begin with, no chorus,
and no ghosts. I was still inclined to go to a Greek drama-
tist for my theme, but I was determined to do so
merely as a point of departure, and to conceal the
origins
so well that nobody would identify them until I
pointed
them out myself. In this at least I have been successful;
for no one of my acquaintance (and no dramatic critics)

recognized the source of my story in the Alcestis of

Euripides. In fact^ I have had to go into detailed explana-
tion to convince mean, of course, those who
them I

were familiar with the plot of that play of the genuine-

ness of the inspiration. But those who were at first dis-
turbed by the eccentric behaviour of my un^o
and intemperate habits and tendency to
his apparently

burst into song, have found some consolation after I have

called their attention to the behaviour of Heracles in

Euripides' play.
In the second place, I laid down for myself the ascetic
rule to avoid poetry which could not stand the test of
strict dramatic utility
: with such success, indeed, that it

is
perhaps an open question whether there is
any poetry
in the play at all. And finally, I tried to keep in mind that
in a play, from time to time, something should happen ;
that the audience should be kept in the constant expecta-
tion that something is
going to happen and that, when
;

it does happen, it should be different, but not too differ-

ent, from what the audience had been led to expect.
have not yet got to the end of my investigation of the
I

weaknesses of this play, but I hope and expect to find

'
more than those of which am
yet aware. I say hope
I
'

because while one can never repeat a success, and there-

fore must always try to find something different, even if
less
popular, to do, the desire to write something which
will be free of the defects of one's last work is a very

powerful and useful incentive. I am aware that the last act

of my play only just escapes, if indeed it does escape, the
accusation of being not a last act but an epilogue and I ;

am determined to do something different, if I can, in this

respect.
I also believe that while the self-education of a

poet trying to write for the theatre seems to require a long

period of disciplining his poetry, and putting it, so to
speak, on a very thin
diet in order to adapt it to the needs

of the stage, there may be a later stage, when (and if)

the

understanding of theatrical technique has become second

32
nature, atwhich he can dare to make more liberal use of
liberties with ordinary colloquial
poetry and take greater
that belief on the evolution of Shakespeare,
speech. base
I

and on some study of the language in his late plays.

In devoting so much time to an examination of my
own plays,
I have, I believe, been animated by a better
motive than egotism. It seems to me that if we are to have
a poetic drama, it is more likely to come from poets

learning how to write plays, than from skilful prose

dramatists learning to write poetry. That some poets can
learn how to write plays, and write good ones, may be

only a hope, but I believe a not unreasonable hope but

;

that a man who has started by writing successful prose

plays should then learn how to write good poetry, seems
to me extremely unlikely. And, under present-day condi-
tions, and until the verse play recognized by the larger
is

public as a possible source of entertainment, the poet is

likely to get his first for the stage

opportunity to work
only after making some sort of reputation for himself as
the author of other kinds of verse. I have therefore
wished to put on record, for what it may be worth to
others, some account of the difficulties I have encoun-
tered,and the mistakes into which I have fallen, and the
weaknesses I have had to try to overcome.
should not like to close without attempting to set
I

before you, though only in dim outline, the ideal towards

which poetic drama should strive. It is an unattainable
ideal : and that is me, for it provides an
why it interests
incentive towards further
experiment and exploration,
beyond any goal which there is prospect of attaining. It is
a function of all art to
give us some perception of an
P.D.-S 35
order in life, by imposing an order upon it. The painter
works by combination and emphasis among
selection,
the elements of the visible world the musician in the
;

world of sound. It seems to me that beyond the namable,

classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life

when directed towards action the part of life which

prose drama is
wholly adequate to express there is a

fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only

detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can
never completely focus; of feeling of which we are only
aware in a kind of temporary detachment from action.
There are great prose dramatists such^ a^ JIbsen and
Cheldhovj-- who have at times done things of which I
would not otherwise have supposed prose to be capable,
but who seem to me, in spite of their success, to have
been hampered in expression by writing in prose. This
peculiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic
poetry, at its moments of greatest intensity. At such
moments, we touch the border of those feelings which
only music can express. We can never emulate music,
because to arrive at the condition of music would be the
annihilation of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry.

Nevertheless, I have before eyes a kind of

my of mirage
the perfection of verse drama, which would be a design
of human action and of words, such as to present at once
the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order. It seems
to me that Shakespeare achieved this at least in certain
scenes even rather early, for there is the balcony scene
of Romeo and Juliet and that this was what he was
striving towards in his late plays. To go as far in this

direction as it is possible to go, without losing that

34
contact with the ordinary everyday world with which
drama must come to terms, seems to me the proper aim
of dramatic poetry. For it is
ultimately the function of art,
in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and
thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality,
to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness and recon-
ciliation ;
and then leave Dante, to pro-
us, as Virgil left
ceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no
farther.

35